Privacy and trust have become more and more important to computer users over the last several years. As a result, operating systems have evolved to give users more granular control over trust decisions. When interacting with applications and services from unknown third parties using the Internet, users exercise a certain subjective or arbitrary amount of trust that these entities are safe. For example, a user may be hesitant to download content from an unknown source for fear of incurring damage to the computer through computer viruses. Users continually make trust decisions, and many users do so subjectively rather than objectively based on the current set of circumstances surrounding a download. Subjective choices regarding trust may not represent the user's best interest and may, ultimately, negatively impact their trust in the platform, as well as their user experience.
As an example, consider a user browsing the Internet using a web browser. Upon clicking a particular link from a site not previously visited, the content server associated with the link attempts to load an executable file to be run on the user's computer. Existing systems allow the user to choose, through a prompted graphical interface, whether or not to download the file. Often, one of the choices presented to the user is highlighted, and constitutes a default option. The default option is essentially a recommendation made by the system, which the user is free to avoid by choosing a different option. However, many users respond to such graphical interfaces by simply hitting the “Enter” or “Return” key, even without reading the prompt. This action by the user selects the default choice as set on the graphical interface. Research has shown that users tend to gravitate towards defaults. Choosing a non-default answer can have an effect on the user's perception of the program (“The default is wrong—that isn't what I want to do”) or themselves (“How come the program's answer is different from mine? Am I doing something wrong?”). This, in turn, can reinforce inappropriate behaviors in many cases by putting a user at risk even in cases where their “deviance” from what is recommended is a positive.
Existing systems allow a user to configure downloading preferences, such that files will be downloaded without prompting the user, or such that files will not be downloaded at all. Any recommendation provided to the user will be the same, regardless of the user's past decisions. Thus, the recommendation for content from unknown site A will be the same recommendation for content from unknown site B. The existing systems are internal in that they consult information already present on the computer to establish a recommendation to a current user regarding whether or not to download the content.